It is commonly sold at tourist (usually seaside) resorts in the United Kingdom (such as Brighton, Southend-on-Sea, Scarborough, Llandudno or Blackpool) and Ireland (e.g. Bray, Knock or Strandhill); in Gibraltar; in Denmark in towns such as Løkken and Ebeltoft; and in Sydney and Tasmania, Australia.

[1] It is sometimes found in the form of individual sweets, with writing or a pattern in the centre; these are, in effect, slices of rock.

Once poured, food colourings for the casing and lettering are added and mixed in by hand using a spoon or small palette knife.

Once the toffee mixture is poured onto a water-cooled plate, it begins to form a skin underneath; this makes it possible to cut out the colourings, using a pair of shears.

The pulling machine aerates the toffee, turning it from a solid golden mass into the soft white that forms the centre of the stick of rock.

The individual letters are placed between blocks or sticks at this point, to prevent them from losing shape and going flat.

A worker known as a sugar boiler then proceeds to "spin out", or stretch, the boiling onto a long flat slab, where rollers make sure it is kept rolling until it has set hard enough to maintain its round shape.

A Dutch type of confection closely resembling rock is the so-called zuurstok (sour stick).

Its composition is roughly the same as Edinburgh rock but it comes in a different range of flavours, basically with cream of tartar (thus rendering it more or less sour), but also aromatised with cherry, cinnamon or liquorice for example.